NZXT Kraken G10 Cooling Bracket For Reference GTX 980 Ti

I recently upgraded to a NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti, but noticed that the performance was severely limited by throttling due to increased temperatures. The ITX housing for Zeratul is rather small for abundant air circulation, so in keeping with my goal for performance in a small form factor, hybrid cooling made sense.

I’ve been using my Corsair H80 hybrid cooler on my CPU for years, so I jumped on board and bought an H90 to use in tandem with NZXT’s Kraken G10 GPU bracket to replace my reference 980 Ti’s “blower style” fan.

This task required that I shuffle my existing cooling set up around, but overall, I’m very pleased with the results. In fact, even playing older games like Insurgency and Team Fortress 2 on maxed out settings had my fan screaming at 100% to keep temperatures in the low 70°C range. Now I’m able to play these same games 20-30°C cooler and MUCH quieter. 🙂

Here are some pictures from today’s project:

Reference NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti with blower style fan cooling

Dismantling 980 Ti’s stock encasing

Barebones 980 Ti with new thermal paste on GPU

NZXT Kraken G10 GPU bracket mounted on 980 Ti

Corsair H90 hybrid cooler

Moved the H80 CPU cooler to the back to make room for the H90 GPU cooler in the front